Latest Jess Row Quotes from Interviews

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

Jess Row

Teaching, College, Perspective

Source: www.guernicamag.com
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

Jess Row

Hard Work, Intellectual, Kind

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

Jess Row

Technology, Training, Graduates

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

Jess Row

Memories, Squares, Government

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

Jess Row

Karma, World, Way

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

Jess Row

Karma, Fiction, Stories

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

Jess Row

Race, People, Identity

Source: www.guernicamag.com
For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

Jess Row

Buddhism, Practice, Meditation

Source: www.guernicamag.com
The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Jess Row

Identity, Debate, Complicated

Source: www.guernicamag.com
You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

Jess Row

Past, Men, Thinking

Source: www.guernicamag.com
There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

Jess Row

People, Pessimistic, Quiet

Source: www.guernicamag.com
There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

Jess Row

Men, Position Of Power, Black

Source: www.guernicamag.com
There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

Jess Row

White, Differences, Black

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

Jess Row

Hair, Japan, Korea

Source: www.guernicamag.com
The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Jess Row

Attitude, Men, People

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Jess Row

Rocks, Indie Rock, Hip Hop

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Jess Row

Teenager, White, Hip Hop

Source: www.guernicamag.com
The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

Jess Row

Rap, Ice, People

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Jess Row

Baby, Kings, Later In Life

Source: www.guernicamag.com
My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Jess Row

Cities, Volunteer, Parent

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Jess Row

Long, Expectations, Overcoming

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

Jess Row

Race, Wish, Different

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Jess Row

Writing, People, Program

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

Jess Row

Hong Kong

Source: www.guernicamag.com
The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Jess Row

Art, Impact, Appreciate

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Jess Row

Born: October 25, 1974
Occupation: Short story writer
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